Queen of the Damned, that decadent, debauched fever dream of a film based on the third book in The Vampire Chronicles, took Anne Rice’s beloved Lestat and bathed him in a world of neon-streaked excess, of crumbling grandeur, of eternal hunger transfigured into rock-and-roll spectacle. For the film, Jonathan Davis and Richard Gibbs sculpted a sound that thrived in that liminal space between the profane and the divine, where immortality wails through distorted amplifiers, and desire echoes through cavernous arenas. Now, industrial metal band Ruin The Mind takes a fanged bite at covering these five songs with Queen of the Damned (Reloaded).
Davis, whose voice carried the weight of the damned, composed songs that pulsed with the arrogance of an ancient predator and the reckless abandon of a creature long starved for sensation. Ruin The Mind’s renditions on Queen of the Damned (Reloaded) are raw, sinister, and unsettling.
Not Meant for Me slithers through the air like a confession spat in defiance. System surges with the urgency of a beast breaking free from its gilded cage. Redeemer claws through layers of agony and ecstasy, a lament wrapped in chains. Gibbs’ original lush arrangements turned these anthems into something grander, deeper, imbued with the dark theatricality that Lestat himself might have composed had he taken up the guitar rather than the violin. This, by contrast, sounds like an exorcism.
These covers serve as a bloodletting, a requiem for the mortal world Lestat scorned, an invitation to revel in the night, to surrender to the hunger, to kneel before the dark.
For this EP, Ruin The Mind partnered with Richii Wainwright, aka [EXOR].
Listen to Queen of the Damned (Reloaded) below:
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